Saturday, March 12, 2011

Tokyo (CNN) -- A meltdown may have occurred at at least one nuclear power reactor in Japan, the country's chief cabinet secretary, Yukio Edano, said Sunday, adding that authorities are concerned about the possibility of another meltdown at a second reactor.

"We do believe that there is a possibility that meltdown has occurred. It is inside the reactor. We can't see. However, we are assuming that a meltdown has occurred," he said about the No. 1 reactor at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear facility.

"And with reactor No. 3, we are also assuming that the possibility of a meltdown as we carry out measures," Edano said.

Edano's comments confirm an earlier report from an official with Japan's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, who said, "we see the possibility of a meltdown."

"There is a possibility, we see the possibility of a meltdown," said Toshihiro Bannai, director of the apan's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency international affairs office, in a telephone interview from the agency's headquarters in Tokyo. "At this point, we have still not confirmed that there is an actual meltdown, but there is a possibility."

(Reuters) - Arab countries appealed to the United Nations on Saturday to impose a no-fly zone on Libya as government troops backed by warplanes fought to drive rebels from remaining strongholds in western Libya.

Washington, which would play a leading role in enforcing any no-fly zone, called the declaration an "important step"; but it stopped short of commitment to any military action and made no proposal for a swift meeting of the U.N. Security Council.

Arab League Secretary General Amr Moussa said the League, meeting in Cairo on Saturday, had decided that "serious crimes and great violations" committed by the government of Muammar Gaddafi against his people had stripped it of legitimacy.

It was not clear if the League's call for a no-fly zone would provide the unequivocal regional endorsement NATO requires for military action to curb Gaddafi. Diplomats in New York said they could not rule out a weekend meeting of the U.N. Security Council to vote on the issue, but added it was unlikely.

Events on the ground are moving more quickly than international diplomacy. While the EU and Washington hesitate, Gaddafi has marshaled his forces to defy a tide of reform across the Middle East that has seen autocratic rulers in Tunisia and Egypt toppled and unprecedented protest elsewhere.

Pro-Gaddafi troops unleashed an assault on Misrata, Libya's third city and the only rebel outpost between the capital and the eastern front around the oil town of Ras Lanuf.

"We are hearing shelling. We have no choice but to fight,"

rebel spokesman Gemal said by telephone from Misrata.

"I can hear loud explosions," said a resident who would only give his name as Mohammad. "Everybody is rushing home, the shops have closed and the rebels are taking up positions."

Mussa Ibrahim, a government spokesman in Tripoli, could neither confirm nor deny a military operation was under way.

"There is a hard core of al Qaeda fighters there," he said. "It looks like a Zawiyah scenario. Some people will give up, some will disappear ... Tribal leaders are talking to them. Those who stay behind, we will deal with them accordingly."

It took a week of repeated assaults by government troops, backed by tanks and air power, to crush the uprising in Zawiyah, a much smaller town 50 km (30 miles) west of Tripoli.

While the death toll in Zawiyah is unknown, much of the town was destroyed, with buildings around the main square showing gaping holes blown by tank rounds and rockets. Gaddafi's forces bulldozed a cemetery where rebel fighters had been buried.

(Reuters) - A quake-hit Japanese nuclear plant reeling from an explosion at one of its reactors has also lost its emergency cooling system at another reactor, Japan's nuclear power safety agency said on Sunday.

The emergency cooling system is no longer functioning at the No.3 reactor at Tokyo Electric Power Co's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power facility, requiring the facility to urgently secure a means to supply water to the reactor, an official of the Japan Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency told a news conference.

On Saturday, an explosion blew off the roof and upper walls of the building housing the facility's No. 1 reactor, stirring alarm over a possible major radiation release, although the government later said the explosion had not affected the reactor's core vessel and that only a small amount of radiation had been released.

The nuclear safety agency official said there was a possibility that at least nine individuals had been exposed to radiation, according to information gathered from municipal governments and other sources.

A March 12 explosion at the earthquake-damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Okuma, Japan, appears to have caused a reactor meltdown.

The key piece of technology in a nuclear reactor is the control rods. Nuclear fuel generates neutrons; controlling the flow and production rate of these neutrons is what generates heat, and from the heat, electricity. Control rods absorb neutrons — the rods slide in and out of the fuel mass to regulate neutron emission, and with it, heat and electricity generation.

A meltdown occurs when the control rods fail to contain the neutron emission and the heat levels inside the reactor thus rise to a point that the fuel itself melts, generally temperatures in excess of 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit, causing uncontrolled radiation-generating reactions and making approaching the reactor incredibly hazardous. A meltdown does not necessarily mean a nuclear disaster. As long as the reactor core, which is specifically designed to contain high levels of heat, pressure and radiation, remains intact, the melted fuel can be dealt with. If the core breaches but the containment facility built around the core remains intact, the melted fuel can still be dealt with — typically entombed within specialized concrete — but the cost and difficulty of such containment increases exponentially.

However, the earthquake in Japan, in addition to damaging the ability of the control rods to regulate the fuel — and the reactor’s coolant system — appears to have damaged the containment facility, and the explosion almost certainly did. There have been reports of “white smoke,” perhaps burning concrete, coming from the scene of the explosion, indicating a containment breach and the almost certain escape of significant amounts of radiation.

At this point, events in Japan bear many similarities to the 1986 Chernobyl disaster. Reports indicate that up to 1.5 meters (4.9 feet) of the reactor fuel was exposed. The reactor fuel appears to have at least partially melted, and the subsequent explosion has shattered the walls and roof of the containment vessel — and likely the remaining useful parts of the control and coolant systems.

And so now the question is simple: Did the floor of the containment vessel crack? If not, the situation can still be salvaged by somehow re-containing the nuclear core. But if the floor has cracked, it is highly likely that the melting fuel will burn through the floor of the containment system and enter the ground. This has never happened before but has always been the nightmare scenario for a nuclear power event — in this scenario, containment goes from being merely dangerous, time consuming and expensive to nearly impossible.

Radiation exposure for the average individual is 620 millirems per year, split about evenly between manmade and natural sources. The firefighters who served at the Chernobyl plant were exposed to between 80,000 and 1.6 million millirems. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission estimates that exposure to 375,000 to 500,000 millirems would be sufficient to cause death within three months for half of those exposed. A 30-kilometer-radius (19 miles) no-go zone remains at Chernobyl to this day. Japan’s troubled reactor site is about 300 kilometers from Tokyo.

The latest report from the damaged power plant indicated that exposure rates outside the plant were at about 620 millirems per hour, though it is not clear whether that report came before or after the reactor’s containment structure exploded.

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Reuters) - Japanese authorities have told the U.N.'s atomic watchdog they are making preparations to distribute iodine to people living near nuclear power plants affected by Friday's earthquake, the Vienna-based agency said.

Iodine can be used to help protect against thyroid cancer in the case of radioactive exposure in a nuclear accident.

After the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, thousands of cases of thyroid cancer were reported in children and adolescents who were exposed at the time of the accident. More cases are expected.

In Japan Saturday, radiation leaked from a damaged nuclear reactor after an explosion blew the roof off in the wake of the massive earthquake, but the government insisted that radiation levels were low.

Japan's Jiji news agency later said three workers suffered radiation exposure near the Fukushima nuclear plant.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the U.N. nuclear body, said Japanese authorities had informed it of the explosion and that they were "assessing the condition of the reactor core."

Japan expanded the evacuation zone around the plant, Fukushima Daiichi, and also that of the nearby Fukushima Daini nuclear power plant.

"The authorities also say they are making preparations to distribute iodine to residents in the area of both the plants," the IAEA said in a statement.

"The IAEA has reiterated its offer of technical assistance to Japan, should the government request this," it said.

UPDATE: High level of radiation observed at nuclear plantFukushima Prefecture says a high level of radiation has been measured near the Fukushima Number One nuclear power station.

The prefecture says the radiation level rose to 1,015 mircrosieverts per hour on Saturday.

One hour of exposure to this amount of radiation is equivalent to the permissible amount of radiation an ordinary person receives in one year. It is about twice the level that requires power companies to notify the government of an emergency situation.

The government's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency says the power station's operator, Tokyo Electric Power Company, observed the radiation level near a gate on the hillside of the plant at 3:29 PM on Saturday, before an explosion was reported at the nuclear plant.Saturday, March 12, 2011 18:43 +0900 (JST)

An explosion occurred at the Fukushima Dai-Ichi power station north of Tokyo, destroying the walls of the No. 1 reactor building, NHK Television said. The report came after the government said a reactor may be melting.

Smoke was rising around the nuclear reactor after an aftershock from yesterday’s quake struck, Ryohei Shiomi, a spokesman at the country’s nuclear safety agency said by phone.

The spokesman said several people were injured during an aftershock that struck around 3:30 p.m. Japan time, adding he had no further information. Tokyo Electric Power Co., which operates the plant, said it had no information, when contacted by Bloomberg News.

Japan’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency said earlier that a nuclear reactor in the Fukushima Dai-Ichi power station, about 220 kilometers (140 miles) north of Tokyo, may be starting to melt down after Japan’s biggest earthquake on record hit the area yesterday.

Fuel rods at the No. 1 reactor at the plant run by Tokyo Electric Power Co. may be melting after radioactive Cesium material left by atomic fission was detected near the site, Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, spokesman Yuji Kakizaki said by phone today.

“If the fuel rods are melting and this continues, a reactor meltdown is possible,” Kakizaki said. A meltdown refers to a heat buildup in the core of such an intensity it melts the floor of the reactor containment housing.

UPDATE: CNN) -- An explosion at an earthquake-damaged nuclear plant was not caused by damage to the nuclear reactor but by a pumping system that failed as crews tried to bring the reactor's temperature down, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano said Saturday.

The next step for workers at the Fukushima Daiichi plant will be to flood the reactor containment structure with sea water to bring the reactor's temperature down to safe levels, he said. The effort is expected to take two days.

Radiation levels have fallen since the explosion and there is no immediate danger, Edano said. But authorities were nevertheless expanding the evacuation to include a radius of 20 kilometers (about 12.5 miles) around the plant. The evacuation previously reached out to 10 kilometers.

The explosion about 3:30 p.m. Saturday sent white smoke rising above the plant a day after a massive earthquake and tsunami crippled cooling systems at the plant in northeastern Japan. Four workers were injured in the blast.The walls of a concrete building surrounding the reactor container collapsed, but the reactor and its containment system were not damaged in the explosion, Edano said.

Four workers were injured after the blast at the Fukushima Daiichi plant, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano told reporters. It was not immediately clear where the blast occurred inside the plant, or what caused it.

One expert said the explosion was "clearly a serious situation," but may not be related to problems inside the plant's nuclear reactor.Other effects of the tsunami may have caused the blast, said Malcolm Grimston, associate fellow for energy, environment and development at London's Chatham House.

"It's clearly a serious situation, but that in itself does not necessarily mean major (nuclear) contamination," he said.

Japanese public broadcaster NHK said the injured workers were in the process of cooling a nuclear reactor at the plant by injecting water into its core.Earlier Saturday Japan's nuclear agency said workers were continuing efforts to cool fuel rods at the plant after a small amount of radioactive material escaped into the air.The agency said there was a strong possibility that the radioactive cesium monitors detected was caused by the melting of a fuel rod at the plant, adding that engineers were continuing to cool the fuel rods by pumping water around them.

Authorities evacuated people living 10 kilometers from the reactor after an earthquake and tsunami crippled cooling systems there, as well as at another Tokyo Electric Power Company nuclear plant in Japan's Fukushima prefecture.

"This is a situation that has the potential for a nuclear catastrophe. It's basically a race against time, because what has happened is that plant operators have not been able to cool down the core of at least two reactors," said Robert Alvarez, a senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington.

The evacuations notwithstanding, the nuclear safety agency asserted Saturday that the radiation at the plants did not pose an immediate threat to nearby residents' health, the Kyodo News Agency said.

The International Atomic Energy Agency said Friday on its website that the quake and tsunami knocked out a Daiichi reactor's off-site power source, which is used to cool down the radioactive material inside. Then, the tsunami waves disabled the backup source -- diesel generators -- and authorities were working to get these operating.

On Saturday Japanese nuclear authorities said the cooling system had also failed at three of the four reactors at the Fukushima Daini plant -- located in another town in northeaster Japan's Fukushima prefecture.

Janie Eudy told CNN that her 52-year-old husband, Joe, was working at the Daiichi plant and was injured by falling and shattering glass when the quake struck. As he and others were planning to evacuate, at their managers' orders, the tsunami waves struck and washed buildings from the nearby town past the plant.

"To me, it sounded like hell on earth," she said, adding her husband -- a native of Pineville, Louisiana -- ultimately escaped.

The power company reported Saturday that about 1 million households were without power, and that power shortages may occur due to damage at the company's facility."We kindly ask our customers to cooperate with us in reducing usage of power," the company said.